ONE camp-disco-rock ensemble from New York City has seized the stage and captivated us for over a decade with the swift hips and flawless falsetto of down-home boy Jake Shears, the fabulous, loud, and tattooed Ms. Ana Matronic, and their virtuoso, if only slightly more demure comrades, Babydaddy and Del Marquis. Formed in 2001, the Scissor Sisters have been making music that will drive you onto the dance floor. Their mission, though incontrovertibly fun and infectious, also strives to capture and clarify the struggles of the GLBT community.
In “Take Your Mama,” one of their best-known singles, the acoustic guitar drives an addictive rhythm and delectable piano riff like a Lincoln Continental right out of the showroom. The song is about the unraveling of a false identity created to avoid being outed: “Now your girl’s gone missin’ and your house has got an empty bed/ Folks’ll wonder ’bout the wedding, they won’t listen to a word you said.”
“Tits on the Radio,” with its throbbing bass line under Ana Matronic’s monotone, criticizes the gentrification of New York. “Where are the queers on the piers?/ Heard they gave it their best.” Jake Shears later breaks through to scream the chorus: “There ain’t no tits on the radio!” The song does down-and-dirty battle with censorship by using prohibited words like queer, tits, and tranny. It goes on to lament the displacement of sex shops and sex workers: “Dark room Danny can’t see with the lights turned out … hears police alarm.” In “Filthy/Gorgeous,” the policy of criminalizing sex work places those already in dangerous occupations into a criminal justice system that’s tailor-made to abuse and dehumanize them.
“Filthy/Gorgeous” comments on the large number of sex workers who are of trans or genderqueer identity, and the fact that they’re the ones facing assault, battery, theft, and death at the hands of johns and/or police (“The people that you meet want to open you up like Christmas”). Meanwhile the illicit nature of their work deprives them of civil protection (“There ain’t no one gonna listen if you haven’t made a sound”).
Scissor Sisters continued with these themes of injustice and hypocrisy on their second album, Ta-Dah. In “Lights,” the likes of former Senator Larry Craig or mega-church preacher Ted Haggard are conjured by lyrics like “The one you want the most will be the one that you defy.” Meanwhile, in the honky-tonk rock anthem “She’s My Man,” bigoted religious opinion roils the discussion: “When it rains like Revelations, gonna wash these freaks away.” With clear references to New Orleans, “She’s My Man” relates the infamous and inflammatory statements of televangelist Pat Robertson shortly after Hurricane Katrina, when he suggested that the disaster was a sign God’s wrath. It’s the equivalent of the lyric in “Intermission”: “Somebody giving you a piece of advice/ By the way, you’re living in sin.” This curse is later avenged in “She’s My Man,” in which “My girl eats a wounded preacher ’tween two loaves of bread.”
Ta-Dah seeks to counteract that old conservative meme about “the gay lifestyle.” Line by line, its songs deconstruct the notion that the GLBT community is composed of sex and/or drug addicts bent on ruining the nation’s moral fiber. “Everybody Wants the Same Thing” sums it up nicely, declaring that “Love is what I want/ Love is what I give. … That’s how I’m gonna live.” The song “Ooh” complains: “Some people say such awful things/ I don’t understand why they’re so hateful. … I’m not a threat to nobody.” “Ooh” is also an example of how the Scissor Sisters’ blade swings both ways. One of the major divisions within the GLBT movement is the push toward marriage equality. In this song, Shears coos, “We don’t need those diamond rings/ Even though they look tasteful,” and goes on to observe “Chichi Parties/ So important/ Sink a fortune/ High-class apartments/ One or two.”
The band is known for achieving a level of camp that pushes the envelope. Indeed, their camp level is so high that Scissor Sisters risk being written off as a novelty act. Still, to out-camp an already campy meta-community reaches a new level of ironic subversion. Ta-Dah sees Scissor Sisters both at their most ironic and their most on-the-level. With “Ooh,” there’s an honesty in the lyric about for-going diamond rings, because, having been without the marriage option for so long, many committed couples have found they no longer want it. The song then takes a turn toward a critique of queer consumerism, another theme that runs throughout the Scissor Sisters catalog, beginning with “Return to Oz.”
“Return to Oz” leads the listener to contemplate the state of dance clubs and other gay establishments. “Return” paints this world in bleak and darkened shades—“The grass is dead, the gold is brown, and the sky has claws”—where meth, greed, and malice have overtaken the magic and splendor of another time (“What was once Emerald City’s now a crystal town”). The short of “Return to Oz” would become the basis of Scissor Sister’s dark 2010 album Night Work. Its track “Harder You Get” contains the line, “Love is a creeper / I know the Reaper on a first name basis.” The entire atmosphere of the song suggests an overworked torso manipulating a meeker body (“All I want to do tonight is toughen you up”). The examination of hypermasculinity and the assertion of sex as power becomes clearer in the song “Sex and Violence,” which explores the predatory lust that mingles sex with murder. In an SFWeekly interview about Night Work, guitarist Del Marquis explained that the song is narrated from “the point of view of an Internet stalker luring someone … basically to kill them.”
Night Work sweats and pants for more—sex, money, drugs, love. Jake Shears spits a litany of capitalist consumption-regurgitation remorse in “Running Out”: “Running out of money, of love, of luck … of language, of fame, of bread … of each other, of confidence … of drugs, of patience, of air.” It’s exhausting to keep up with. The hoarder mentality (“Love was just something you found to add to your collection”) comes under special scrutiny in “Fire With Fire.”
The final track on Night Work, “Invisible Light,” exclaims: “At the doors of Babylon, you are my Zion.” Even on the brink of being devoured—by a hell conceived by others or ourselves—there is hope and redemption: “Invisible light shoots from your eyes.” In the midst of the track’s surreal drama, the crux of the band’s cause comes to light: to keep us alive. With their pitch-perfect ear for pop music, with their keen sense of justice and activism in their lyrics, Scissor Sisters present one of the best cases I can think of to stay alive and keep dancing.
David K. Wheeler, author of Contingency Plans (poems)
